Radical Byzantium: Modernism and the Corinth Excavations

Kostis Kourelis is an archaeologist of Byzantine settlements and rural landscapes. In addition to his archaeological fieldwork in medieval sites throughout the Mediterranean, Kourelis has been studying alternative historiographies from punk archaeology to man camps in North Dakota. His research in Corinth has revealed a forgotten intimacy between modernist art and the archaeological discipline. He has co-authored Houses of the Morea: Vernacular Architecture of the Northwest Peloponnesos (1205-1955), edited The Abandoned Countryside: (Re)Settlement in the Archaeological Narrative of Post-Classical Greece, and The Archaeology of Xenitia: Greek Immigration and Material Culture, and has curated the exhibit Colors of Greece: The Art and Archaeology of Georg von Peschke. He has written essays ranging from “Byzantine Houses and Modern Fictions: Domesticating Mystras in 1930s Greece” to “Urban Legend: Architecture in Lord of the Rings.”